If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken
off," Emily Dickinson once
said, "I know that is poetry." I'll get back to this, in
a minute.

We were in the lobby of a midtown
bank at 3 a.m., filming that scene --
you know the one -- in which the ghost
of Hamlet's father (Sam Shepard)
appears on a surveillance monitor,
prompting Hamlet's spooked pals to
dash to the elevator to check it out.
After the second take, one of the
producers turned to me and said, "This
reminds me of 'Scooby-Doo' " I
didn't feel insulted. It wasn't the first
or last time I had to face the implicit
question: What are we doing here?
Why "Hamlet" -- again -- here and
now?

The answer leads back to Emily
Dickinson by way of Orson Welles,
who conjured up a version of
"Macbeth" in 1948, shooting for 21
days on an RKO sound stage cluttered
with fantastic, soggy-looking
papier-mâché sets. Welles described
his film as "a rough charcoal sketch" of
the play, and this remark, alongside the
finished picture, provoked in me a
sharp suspicion that you don't need
lavish production values to make a
Shakespeare movie that's accessible
and alive. Shakespeare's language,
after all, is lavish enough. The
meaning and emotion are all embedded
there, line for line, word for word. In
the last 400 years, who more than
Shakespeare has been so directly
responsible for transmitting the
particular electrical charge that Emily
Dickinson described -- the recognition
of sudden and contrary meanings
colliding in your brain, a certain
top-of-your-head-being-taken-off
feeling? Dickinson herself felt the
ceiling lift when reading Shakespeare. After first taking in
a volume of his plays, she was
prompted to ask: "Why is any other book needed?"

At any rate, I was visited by an elemental desire to film
Shakespeare. It was, as Emily would
have it, practically a physical impulse -- like wanting to go
swimming in the ocean, or
running out into a storm at night. Then again, maybe it
wasn't so purely hedonistic. I had
some hope that my reflexes as a filmmaker would be tested,
battered and bettered. That I'd
be swept along into deeper Shakespearean currents.

I was hovering over various possibilities, relatively obscure
plays -- and I was resisting
"Hamlet." It seemed too familiar, too obvious, and it's been
filmed at least 43 times. Better
to leave it to high school productions, spoofs and skits and
"The Lion King." As T. S. Eliot
noted years back, "Hamlet" is like the Mona Lisa, something
so overexposed you can
hardly stand to look at it.

But masterpieces are definably masterpieces because they have
a way of manifesting
themselves in our everyday lives. The play, and the
character, seemed to be chasing me
around New York. I passed high school kids quoting "Hamlet"
on the street. I was
informed of the existence of a "Hamlet" porno film. And I
found myself thinking back to
my first impressions of the play, remembering its
adolescence-primed impact and meaning
for me -- the rampant parallels between the melancholy Dane
and my many doomed and
damaged heroes and imaginary friends: James Agee, Holden
Caulfield, James Dean, Egon
Schiele, Robert Johnson, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Jean Vigo.

I was struck by the fact that no film of "Hamlet" features a
truly young man. In dozens of
versions (including two silent films with women in the title
role) none of the actors were
under 30, and the most definitive, conspicuous modern
incarnations -- Olivier, Richard
Burton, Kevin Kline, Mel Gibson -- were all at least 40 when
they tackled the part. (
Kenneth
Branagh, at 35, seemed hardly any younger, despite his
trim platinum haircut and the
enthusiastic swashbuckling moves unleashed for the climactic
duel.) Why not entrust the role
to an actor in his 20's? The character takes on a different
cast when seen more clearly as an
abandoned son, a defiant brat, a narcissist, a poet/
filmmaker/perpetual grad student -- a
radiantly promising young man who doesn't quite know who he
is. (The play's famously
simple first line is, "Who's there?")

And I was heartened by the Polish scholar Jan Kott's
passionately lucid 1964 book,
"Shakespeare Our Contemporary." "The genius of 'Hamlet,' "
Mr. Kott wrote, "consists in
the fact that the play can serve as a mirror. An ideal
'Hamlet' would be one most true to
Shakespeare and most modern at the same time."

Given the story's familiarity, it seemed altogether natural
to locate a new "Hamlet" in the
immediate present, to translate the Danish kingdom into a
multimedia corporation, and to
watch the story unfold in penthouse hotel rooms, sky-level
office corridors, a coffee shop,
an airplane, the Guggenheim Museum. The chief thing was to
balance respect for the play
with respect for contemporary reality -- to see how
thoroughly Shakespeare can speak to the
present moment, how they can speak to each other.

Then I showed Ethan Hawke a six-page treatment and
explained my intention --
to shoot fast and cheap in New York, to film in
super 16 millimeter, to make
everything as urgent and intimate as possible, to
keep all spoken dialogue as
written by Shakespeare but set within and energized by a
contemporary context -- Ethan got
it immediately. He trusted me, and he was ready, with a
breathtaking absence of
Hamlet-like equivocation, to leap in. "You know," he said
during our first discussion, in a
bar, over mid-afternoon glasses of beer, "we don't have to go
to Yale to do this." Then
again, given 400 years of tradition, we knew we could never
prepare enough. Ethan
worked with an actor who had previously played Hamlet on
stage (a gifted man too modest
and ambitious to want himself credited as a coach), and we
met at least once a week, reading
and talking through the play, most often in Ethan's study,
where he tended to pace around
the pool table that dominated the room.

Ethan's contributions were essential. Fortified by Harold
Goddard's excellent critical study,
"The Meaning of Shakespeare" (unfortunately out of print), he
made a case for Hamlet as
someone whose hesitation to kill Claudius is justified,
contrary to the questionable
imperatives of revenge or the bloodlust of an impatient
audience. Hamlet doesn't need to
kill Claudius, Ethan insisted, once he's made the man face
his own guilt. "There's nothing in
the body of Shakespeare's work that suggests he thinks murder
is a good thing," he said.
The level of vulnerability Ethan brought to the role, the
quality of imploding self-doubt, is
tempered by this conclusion, as is our entire treatment of
the story.

Later on, Ethan passed me a video cued to a clip of the
Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh,
whose concept of "inter-being" felt like a perfect ramp
leading up to Hamlet's most famous
soliloquy. I tossed it into the mix -- the one modern
pre-recorded voice, I'd like to think, that
Shakespeare wouldn't consider an intrusion.

Through all this I was watching every version of "Hamlet"
available in New York,
scheduling systematic visits to the Museum of Modern Art, the
Museum of Television and
Radio and the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln
Center. (This is a curiously
claustrophobic activity. You plug yourself into headphones
and a monitor mounted within a
tight Formica cubicle, surrounded almost exclusively by
middle-aged men studying old
Broadway musicals.)

Of course, I rummaged through books of critical theory but,
more to the point, I never
stopped reading the play, which carries the best advice for
any director: "Suit the action to the
word, the word to the action." This is so smart and simple
it's almost stupefying.

The screenplay came together quickly and even easily -- a
process of channeling and
distillation. (Typing Shakespeare straight into your computer
is a thrilling act of
ventriloquism that I can recommend to any writer.) My main
job, anticipating work behind
the camera, was to imagine a parallel visual language that
might hold a candle to
Shakespeare's poetry. There was no wish to illustrate the
text, but to focus it, building a
visual structure to accommodate Shakespeare's imagery and
ideas.

From what I can tell, global corporate power is as smoothly
treacherous and absolute as
anything going in a well-oiled feudal kingdom, and the notion
of an omnipresent Denmark
Corp. provided an easy vehicle for Claudius's smiling
villainy. But this was a key opening a
wider door. It's more meaningful to explore how Shakespeare's
massive interlocking themes
-- innocence and corruption, identity and fate, love and
death, the division between action
and thought -- might be heightened, even clarified, when
colliding with the spectacle of
contemporary media-saturated technology.

Shakespeare, after all, has Hamlet caught in the wheels of
his own hyperactive mind,
enthralled by "words words words." The film admits that
images currently keep pace with
words, or outstrip them, creating a kind of overwhelming
alternate reality. So nearly every
scene in the script features a photograph, a TV monitor, an
electronic recording device of
some kind. The play-within-the-play becomes Hamlet's homemade
video projection.
Polonius (Bill Murray) eavesdrops on his daughter (Julia
Stiles) by taping a microphone to
her shirt. (This was Ethan's inspiration, courtesy of Linda
Tripp.) And while nature, in the
dialogue, is continually invoked, the characters in the film
are never exposed to a real
landscape until they arrive, en masse, at Ophelia's funeral
-- the graveyard being the only
respite from the city's hard surfaces, mirrors, screens and
signs.

In reviews published since the movie's premiere, in late
January at the Sundance Film
Festival, the only criticism that's rattled me are the
strangely bitter complaints about
"product placement" -- carping fueled by the cynical
assumption that billboards and
logos on display in the film were promotional throwaways by
which the producers lined their
pockets. The undignified, all but unbelievable truth is that
we paid for the privilege of
parading certain logos and insignias across the screen. There
was, after all, an intended
point. "Denmark is a prison," Hamlet declares early on, and
if you consider this in terms of
contemporary consumer culture, the bars of the cage are
defined by advertising, by all the
hectic distractions, brand names, announcements and ads that
crowd our waking hours. And
when, in this independent film, the ghost of Hamlet's father
vanishes into a Pepsi machine,
or Hamlet finds himself questioning the nature of existence
in the "Action" aisles of a
Blockbuster video store, or Shakespeare's lines are
overwhelmed by the roar of a plane
passing overhead -- it's meant as something more than casual
irony. It's another way to
touch the core of Hamlet's anguish, to recognize the frailty
of spiritual values in a material
world, and to get a whiff of something rotten in Denmark on
the threshold of our
self-congratulatory new century.

All the same, the film contains some dazzling contradictions.
The fact that this "Hamlet,"
skidding into being on a perilously low budget, happens to
feature a notably high-profile cast
-- prominent actors all working for scale -- is further
testament to Shakespeare's supernatural
status as the great leveler, unifier of mighty opposites.

In most cases, the actors were my first choices for the
roles. Sam Shepard, preparing the
ghost's big speech, confided that he'd never worked so
hard on a part, never felt so
challenged. (I can report, in turn, that I never saw the
ghost played with such an
electrifying sense of reality.) Bill Murray, showing up for
the script reading, disingenuously
volunteered that nobody had ever asked him to play
Shakespeare before. (He then confessed
he'd taken workshops, years earlier, with the magical scholar
and voice coach Kristin
Linklater, and he handled the language with such eccentric
agility that I'm hoping he tackles a
heftier Shakespearean role down the road.) It also emerged
that Mr. Murray, in the course of
an action-packed career, had never taken on a film in which
he was obliged to die. Whereas
Ethan Hawke had always resisted roles requiring his character
to kill someone. And here we
all were -- all the actors in the film doing miraculous work,
coerced by Shakespeare into
facing an extended part of themselves, a new kind of reality.

It's a truism that every movie is made three times: in the
writing, in the shooting, and in the
editing, each process generating new contingencies and
surprises. And so, many of our best
and worst ideas fell by the wayside -- sacrificed for the
sake of clarity and momentum and to
dodge mistakes, making this latest "Hamlet" the most
condensed straight film adaptation in
English. Entire scenes were dropped, Shakespeare's text was
further trimmed and torn, and
the result is, inevitably, an attempt at "Hamlet" -- not so
much a sketch but a collage, a
patchwork of intuitions, images and ideas.

"Who's there?" The famous stark first line was finally cut,
with great reluctance. But we
never stopped asking ourselves the question. Shakespeare's
most inexhaustible play -- an
echo chamber, a bottomless well, a hall of mirrors, an
untamable beast -- keeps throwing
back infinite answers.

Michael Almereyda is the director of "Nadja" (1994) and
"Another Girl Another Planet"
(1992). His "Hamlet" opens Friday May 12, 2000.

Two Fortinbrases and the Ghosts of Hamlets Past
By Matthew Gurewitsch
New York Times
December 19, 1999

What may be the very last new "Hamlet" of Shakespeare's millennium opens at
the Joseph Papp Public Theater tonight -- boards that many melancholy Danes
have trod before.

&nbsp

Photo by Sara Krulwich

This time, Liev Schreiber wears the
customary suits of solemn black, under
the direction of the Romanian-born
Andrei Serban, an unapologetic
eclectic. In his early years, Mr. Serban
assisted Peter Brook and went on to
make his name with experimental
productions of Greek tragedy,
Chekhov, Goldoni and Shakespeare
for companies including La Mama, the
American Repertory Theater in
Cambridge, Mass., and the Public. His
awareness of the history of "Hamlet"
and of theater history in general
converge at the moment shown in the
accompanying photograph, when the
prince is dispensing his famous advice
to the players.

"O, there be players that I have seen play . . .," Hamlet begins airily, proceeding to diss them
all. As he does so, cast members carry on posters of Hamlets past. Ralph Fiennes, lately of
Broadway, is there, along with the Public's own Sam Waterston, Kevin Kline and Diane
Venora (borne by Ms. Venora herself, this production's Gertrude), plus the celluloid
princelings Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson and
Kenneth Branagh, not to mention John
Barrymore and Sarah Bernhardt, still legends after generations.

Last and largest in the parade is a blow-up of Mr. Schreiber, so big that it takes two actors to
carry it. They enter just in time to illustrate the final words of Hamlet's critique: "They
imitated humanity so abominably." Subtext: If the shoe fits . . . Preview audiences have been
giving the line a laugh.

For those who don't get it, Mr. Serban offered this brief aside: "When the posters arrive, the
audience may say: 'Where are we? Are we in Elsinore?' I say, 'Listen, we are not in
Elsinore, guys, we are in the theater.' "

Quite a few quantities in this "Hamlet" bear noting. A single intermission. Two Fortinbrases.
Three extra ghosts of Hamlet's father. And so on.

About the intermission, Mr. Serban said: "After directing Wagner's 'Ring' in San Francisco
this summer, I could see a value created by sheer duration. You're entering a new universe.
When you're on a journey, you don't feel time so much. Second, the play has two broad
movements. First, Hamlet is given his mission of revenge by the ghost, an aim he pursues
more and more unsuccessfully until he kills Polonius. Hamlet's departure for England closes
the first cycle. When he comes back to Denmark, he has found out about courage,
determination, will, following one's aim -- everything he has been missing."

And why the double Fortinbras? Shakespeare's prince of Norway is a man of steel who
arrives at Elsinore just in time to take charge without a fight. In Mr. Serban's show, a Joan
of Arc arrives, arm in arm with an androgynous twin brother, with whom she recites in
high-pitched, echo-distorted tones.

"Hamlet's death is a kind of sacrifice," the director said. "He wants to give an example that
will give other people a chance to get things right. Then Fortinbras appears, like the
Archangel Gabriel, in the outfit of a warrior. But they are warriors in a spiritual army,
bringing peace, a caressing kind of hope."

It is a coda for a mystery play, worlds away from where the show began, hours before,
when a stagehand hauled out a smoke machine, à la Brecht, and released a few puffs. In
between, Hamlet has taunted Ophelia in scenes straight from Artaud's Theater of Cruelty,
there have been touches of Meyerhold, a ghost out of an Elizabethan trapdoor, a closet scene
that is pure Stanislavsky and a gravedigger on loan from the New Vaudeville. Nor has Mr.
Serban excluded Kabuki, Noh and other traditions of the East.

Why all these styles? "They are trying to mirror life," Mr. Serban said. "In life, there is so
much comedy and tragedy one moment after another. But it's hard to say that life has a
style."

In the old days of school testing, before multiple choice turned academic know-how into something of a lottery, a favorite scholastic instrument of torture was the dangerously simple-sounding proposition, "Compare and contrast ... " Comparing and contrasting is, of course, part of the technical arsenal critics are supposed to bring to their craft. You can't expect a critic to deliver an objective opinion -- an opinion by definition is subjective -- but you can at least hope for an opinion that is informed.

It is here that comparing and contrasting becomes useful. If, for example, a critic writes that "this is the best damned Hamlet I've ever seen," if it's the first damned Hamlet he or she had ever seen, it is also the worst damned Hamlet he or she had ever seen. I mention Hamlet, I suppose, because last week we had Liev Schreiber tackling the gloomy Dane in Andrei Serban's bizarre staging of "Hamlet" at the Joseph Papp Public Theater. A revered colleague of mine, J.C. Trewin, once wrote a book called "Five & Eighty Hamlets." I am not sure how many Hamlets I have seen from my first boyhood sight of Alec Guinness playing it in modern dress in 1938 up until Schreiber last week, but by now it must be that many. When asked to name the best Hamlet I ever saw, I sometimes feel perverse and want to name some Hamlets that I enjoyed but were generally poorly reviewed.

I'm remembering Guinness (not in the modern-dress version, but later when he was, in my experience, the first bearded Hamlet), Alan Bates and Peter O'Toole opening up Olivier's National Theater, when I think I was the only critic in the civilized world who gave him a rave. The screen Hamlet I admired most was neither Olivier nor Kenneth Branagh, but Mel Gibson -- and that's not perversity, just good taste. And of American Hamlets? I was too young to have seen Barrymore, but I suppose the three most notable American Hamlets since have been Stacy Keach, Kevin Kline and Sam Waterston. Kline was an athletic soldier-prince, a sort of Henry V with doubts, while Waterston suggested a scholar whose resolution was "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." But for me, the best of that bunch was Keach, whose neurotic passion and fierce poetry were quite wonderful.

Which brings us to the latest Hamlet -- Schreiber, who, against all odds, proved both thoughtfully poetic and bold. The difficulty with a classic as well-thumbed as "Hamlet" is partly to persuade an audience to sit up and take notice -- but you have to be careful of what notice is being taken. Hamlet on a bicycle or a speedboat might be striking but would probably also be irrelevant. That kind of artistic and cultural irrelevancy abounds in Serban's curiously wrong-headed "Hamlet." The circumstances -- even odder than those faced by Martin Sheen, who played Hamlet in Joseph Papp's own weird staging at the Public Theater back in 1967 -- made Schreiber's triumph all the more impressive. Although a movie and TV star, he is not just a pretty face -- in fact, he has an interestingly pudgy face -- and he could have a terrific future as a classic player, or any other kind of player.